Student Colleagues

After immersing myself in the abstract readings of composition theory, I am suddenly at ease when I engage with the pedagogical practices of an honest teacher--one who truly wants the best for his students. Alfie Kohn's essay, "How to Create Nonreaders," was a drink of cool water. It contains helpful and contemporary strategies for guiding a successful classroom by engaging students' autonomy. Speaking from his honest and reflective experience in his own classroom, Kohn takes on students assessment (in light of "No Child Left Behind") and is self-critical of his own urge to impose curriculum upon his students.

Kohn exposes some common classroom practices as the reason for student apathy. Students decide against engaging with reading communities if they are forced to quantify their reading, report on it in isolation, focus on testable skills and suppress their choices. These ideas agree with the predominant perspective of literacy pedagogy that we have discussed in class: independent learners and dialectical discourse. Smagorinsky alighted briefly on this point, and it can also by found in Woerkum's "The Active Reader."

In essence Kohn's central idea is that teachers should view their students as colleagues. He argues that a teacher cannot motivate a student to read, but the teacher can create the learning environment necessary to promote reading and dialectical discussion. The teacher does this by establishing a discourse community in which the teacher asks students to choose rather than dictates lessons. It's the difference between a totalitarian classroom in which rules are imposed, and a classroom that allows democratic and individual freedom.

It's not amorphous and Montessori-like in Kohn's proposed classrooms, as it may sound. Students are given an academic space in which they can generate ideas and actively engage with the curriculum by offering response questions, or test dates, or essay topics. The instructor still has a job to do by guiding student inquiry to meet course objectives.

Why is Kohn's article relevant to current pedagogy and practice? A teacher's major obstacle is getting students to engage with their reading. If we replace condescension in the classroom with the idea that students are our colleagues, they will be empowered to join the discussion and make educational choices that fit their needs. Let them tell us. Then, they will be doing the same work as us as teachers: motivating themselves to educate.